A utility provider, such as a gas, electricity, or water provider, may have a large number of control, measuring, and sensing devices installed in the field in order to control transmission and distribution of the product, measure, and record product usage, and detect problems. Such devices may include water, gas, or electrical meters, remotely controlled valves, flow nodes, leak detection devices, and the like. Utility meters may include wireless communication capability to send and receive wireless communications with a remote communication device, enabling remote reading of meters. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Automatic Meter Reading (AMR), and Advanced Metering Management (AMM) are systems that measure, collect, and analyze utility data using advanced metering devices such as water meters, gas meters, and electricity meters.
A typical network may include thousands of nodes. A “node” as used herein may refer to either a composite device in a network capable of performing a specific function or a communication module connected to such a device and configured to provide communications for the device. The network may also include a device known as a repeater, which receives a signal from a central network device, such as a hub, and that regenerates the signal for distribution to other network devices. The hub receives communications from a server. The server may originate the sending of a message to downstream devices in the network, either directly to each of those devices individually, or as a broadcast to the devices collectively. As used herein, “broadcast” includes sending a message that seeks to generate a response from more than one downstream device in a network. Broadcasting a single message to a plurality of downstream devices in the network (such as nodes) may save time and power compared with sending the identical message directly to each downstream device individually, which can take several hours or longer, depending on the number of downstream devices to be contacted. While broadcasting may represent an improvement over performing repeated messages for each individual node, broadcasting presents (among other problems) the problem of response signal collisions, because a network may include potentially thousands of downstream devices that may send response signals back simultaneously, which risks overwhelming devices (hub, server, etc.) when attempting to process each response signal.